THE GROTESQUE ARGUMENT INTENDED TO SCARE YOU INTO PAYING FOR ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES FOR SANDRA FLUKE AND EVERYONE WHO AGREES WITH HER

The unspoken public policy argument that we should underwrite birth control through our insurance payments is that if we don’t, we’ll end up paying for baby food and maternal care, which on balance would cost more than the $1,000 per year of which Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke has so publicly complained -- and which won her a call from a very concerned Barack Obama, a concern he has not shown for any woman suffering from genital herpes.

Even if you accept – which I don't – the argument that it's better to pay for a woman’s birth control now than for her otherwise resulting infant(s) later, then Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her pandering boss should encourage the use of the single cheapest birth control method that also -- alone among the many varieties of contraception -- prevents sexually transmitted diseases (STDs.)

Why promote a form of birth control that is a surefire guarantor of the spread of 20+ -- many fatal -- STDs when an alternative is readily available in drugstores and even gas stations nationwide? I refer, of course, to condoms.

If any readers imagine that it’s “only” older women in their 40s or 50s who are at risk for deep-vein thrombosis from oral contraceptives, I can assure them that this is not so, based on the experience of a 22-year-old friend of mine who had one -- lodged perilously in her lungs -- as a direct result of the combination of smoking and birth control pills. My friend survived. Not all victims do.